Sunday, January 06, 2008

Today's New York Times
Magazine has an article
about Mitt Romney, Mormonism, and politics. The the article
doesn't really add much to my knowledge or understanding of Mormons
and politics, but then again I'm a political junkie, and live in
Massachusetts, where Mitt Romney was governor (and where he lived for
30 years, raised his kids, and now slags on as part of his protean
campaign for the Republican nomination).

The article does include one paragraph I found very
thought-provoking:

Still, even among those who respect Mormons personally, it is still
common to hear Mormonism's tenets dismissed as ridiculous. This
attitude is logically indefensible insofar as Mormonism is being
compared with other world religions. There is nothing inherently less
plausible about God's revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer
in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh's changeling
grandson in ancient Egypt. But what is driving the tendency to
discount Joseph Smith's revelations is not that they seem less
reasonable than those of Moses; it is that the book containing them is
so new. When it comes to prophecy, antiquity breeds authenticity.
Events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred,
mythic time. Not so revelations received during the presidencies of
James Monroe or Andrew Jackson.

I've wondered about this aspect of religion-in-public-life before.
Is there any rational (as opposed to merely rationalized) basis for
mocking the Mormon or Scientologist religious stories (or, for that
matter, those of Heaven's
Gate or other cults) but not those of mainstream Christianity,
Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and so on?

Full disclosure time: I'm an atheist. I find the
supernatural/theological content of most religions to be bunk. (Aram says I worship the top quark, which is
metaphorically true -- I suppose this makes me a Unitarian physicist.)
I was raised in a fairly standard mainstream Protestant Christian
(Presbyterian, to be exact) household, and to complete the stereotype,
I am a preacher's kid.

I do feel an urge to give a something of a pass to older
religions, at least to the followers thereof who don't take their
founding texts literally. The question is: is this merely
familiarity? Antiquity giving a patina of respectability? Or is it
the actual content? Or something more meta?

It might be the content. Both Mormon and Scientologist "history"
make some fairly silly factual/historical claims (with L. Ron beating
Joseph Smith on the silliness meter, but he had the advantage of being
a science fiction writer). The stories of Jesus of Nazareth are
actually much less miraculous than the stories of Genesis. Don't get
me wrong -- the Christian Gospels are full of miracles, but they're
all relatively small in scale. Raising the dead is pretty amazing,
but it was one guy, not millions. Walking on water is cool, but it's
again, one guy. Loaves and fishes and water into wine? Both
one-time, one-gathering things. And even the Resurrection? One guy,
one-time event. Compared to Moses (parting the Red Sea, Ten
Commandments [all variousversions],
plagues, etc.), Jesus' miracles are pretty darn local. ("Think
globally, miracle locally"?) If you take away the miracles (or take
them as metaphor, or whatever), though, there's actually a fair amount
of story left.

Aside: one of the things I find weirdest about
fundamentalist/literalist Christians is how much (i.e. basically all)
of their issues (e.g. with evolution) are from the Old Testament. As
Lewis
Black put it, "it's not their book!".

So maybe it's not the content specifically -- Jesus visiting the
lost tribes of Israel over in North America after the Resurrection, or
Thetans visiting Earth in DC-9-resembling spaceships parked in
volcanoes, aren't all that much crazier than Great Floods or Red Seas
Parting, or the whole Garden of Eden thing. Maybe it's the
literalism. I find Christian Biblical Literalism to be ludicrous in
the abstract and scary in the concrete, and I have similar
responses to both Mormonism and Scientology. (By the way, I do not
consider it coincidental that Romney is running for President fairly
soon after Tom Cruise jumped
the couch. There's nothing like a newer cult/religion to
legitimize a slightly older one by contrast.)

But I think it's more than just literalism vs. metaphor here. I
think it really comes under the heading of presentism.
I guess I consider anything after the Enlightenment to be part of
the modern "now", and wonder how anyone in the modern era could ever
take something like the literal claims of Mormonism or Scientology
seriously. And I'm willing to give a pass to older established
religions because People Back Then were ignorant and superstitious,
lacking Our Modern Perspective.

The only wiggle room I see for getting out of my self-diagnosed
Presentism is to say that since we don't actually know with good
documentary evidence how most of the well-established religions
started, People Back Then might not have taken things as literally as
we assume, while we know a lot about the start of Mormonism and
Scientology, because they're within modern historical (and in the case
of Scientology, living) memory. But I think that's a pretty weak
wiggle.

And since I find literalist adherents of older established
religions to be as silly as literalist Mormons or Scientologists, I
guess that settles it for my position: all religions are full of
historical claims that are deeply sily and at odds with the evidence
of the world. Anyone who takes those claims literally is choosing
willful falsehood over evidence-based science. That's their choice.
It's not what I'd want for myself, and it's certainly not what I want
in a President.

4 comments:

I think there is an assumption (in culture, not in this post) that any member of a new religious movement must be taking all of its claims literally. I'm not sure how true that is. I would suspect, for example, that Romney is significantly less fundamentalist about the Book of Mormon than Huckabee is about the New Testament.

You might be surprised to learn that Mormons spend twice as much time studying the Bible as the Book of Mormon.

The church is founded on a view of Jesus Christ found in the New Testament. Its theology is much closer to Early Christianity than any other denomination. For example, the Bible Dictionary states that Trinitarianism is not to be found in the New Testament.

For more information, refer to: http://MormonsAreChristian.blogspot.com

I've said it before, and one of my mentors, the theologian Paul L. Holmer said it many times before me: There is nothing compelling in the scriptural narratives. The atheist can touch scripture and remain unscathed. He or she can read the Bible from cover to cover--Genesis to Maps--and remain an unbeliever.

Religion and spirituality are mostly psychology, just as Freud said. Ironically, many of Freud's critics argue that psychoanalysis is just a religion. Now there's a snarky bind!

I once recommended what I thought was an astonishingly beautiful essay to a friend, who read it thoughtfully, shrugged his shoulders, and tossed it back to me with a grunt. It didn't speak to him. He read it out of deference to me, and he may even have tried to figure out what I saw in it, but it didn't move him.

We're still friends. We still respect each other's intellects, and we still love each other. But there are certain essays, beloved to me, that I no longer recommend to him.

It's not his book, so to speak, and now he and I both know it. Curiously, people who are genuinely spiritual can often find solace and inspiration in the scriptural writings of other religions. This is the case for me, when I read the Old Testament or the Qur'an, and I've found much of interest, as well, when I've read in the Book of Mormon.

The Christian fundamentalist's relationship to the Old Testament, however, is something else altogether. More a fetish, really, and an unholy one at that. It's not their book and, as a result, they misinterpret it and misuse it, much of the time, to justify being harsh, exclusive, and judgmental.

It must be a terrible irony to the Jews--the true people of the Covenant--to see their scripture abused in this way and, in the most grotesque of tragedies, to see it turned against them.

My brethren, we Christians bleed for you and with you, because we are witnessing the demoralization of our spirituality and the perversion of our religion seemingly from within. The fundamentalists among us who call themselves Christians have elevated their mean and impoverished apprehension of the Old Testament over the primary themes of what, by rights, they should be claiming as their book, the New Testament. And what are these themes? Faith, hope, love, forgiveness, mercy, acceptance, and peace.

I think that the Christian theologian, Robert Roberts--yes, that's his real name--said it best. (This will be a poor paraphrase, since I can't, at the moment, locate the essay in question.)

Christianity, whatever else it may be, is a set of emotions--emotions written large upon the personality and born out of a particular relationship to God. And so it happens that if we are not contrite over our waywardness, if we are not quick to love and to accept, if we do not hunger for God's forgiveness and extend that forgiveness to others, and if our hearts never sing unbidden with the joy that is a life in God, then we are not Christian. Though we place the name of God on our lips and hug our Bibles to our hearts, if we are not in some measure repentant, loving, and forgiving, we are not Christian.

As a psychologist, I've looked into the eyes and listened to the words of many fundamentalists, and I see few Christians among them. As a Christian, I will welcome them home with open arms, whenever their own book begins to speak to them. Until that happens, I will pray for the will and the strength to forgive.